I’ll just point out here that while this is progress from the feller’s perspective, there is another party to all these creepy/awkward failure conversations, who by definition isn’t feeling so good about them. All these “Ifs” have alternative scenarios.
It should go without saying (especially today of all days!) that society shits on women, too. And I’d much rather be a marginalized man than a marginalized woman on the dating scene.
I don’t know if we disagree at all. Commitments to political projects are a cold comfort when they’re only going to benefit future generations. So I prefer the two-pronged approach. Sure, you might have to give in a bit to acting out the role society assigned you, but you don’t have to subsume yourself in it. Having an intellectual framework to understand what you’re doing and why lets you define the terms on which you engage society-as-it-exists. In a dark twisted way, that’s a large part of the pick-up artist appeal.
It’s also fair to mention that thinking of women as human beings instead of some mysterious other is itself conducive to having good luck dating, so there’s that reason too 
Absolutely. It also requires you to get hurt, and keep getting hurt, and really fucking feel the hurt. That’s the only way it ever gets to hurt any less. You have to run the risk of burning out and giving up in despair. And fight it. Again and again. Every. God. Damn. Day. (Person with clinical depression talking.)
I don’t know how people find the strength. I’m not even dumb-smart enough to feel good for them when they do. I wish I could.
It’s easy to forget, when you see folks every day doing their thing and being easy together and such, that we each have to pull a helluva lot of weight in this life just to stay in one place. Actually making headway is another thing entirely. Keep on keepin’ on, I guess. (Maybe I need to embrace cliché more fully! :rolleyes: )
I have it on good authority that we are actually aliens.
Depression hurts even without any added stress like alienation or loneliness. I only dealt with it for a few months years ago, but it was enough for me to understand the pain.
The best I can offer, honestly, is to say that the “getting hurt” part of shyness and social awkwardness usually isn’t all that painful when kept in perspective. I mean, lord knows I’ve done stupid things and felt embarrassed about them later, but it’s not a given that social experimentation is one big miserable experience after another.
It’s hard to add to perfection, but I’ll try here.
These guys who are resentful need a support group. But all they get is judgemental bullshit instead.
That so many people have next to zero idea of what happens when you do this to a group of people is sad, but not surprising. We always need the low male on the totem poles to beat on.
Those are mere fantasies…
Pretty much.
I’d imagine you can answer that yourself, but… resentment, for one, and many of the guys you hear saying women suck, for two.
BTW can someone explain to me why women never catch hell for bashing men? 
So, when you said
You meant that if men go without sex or romance they will become resentful and possibly say women suck. This is a pretty shocking and ghastly thing. What is it that women do if they go without sex and romance? They can’t become resentful or say men suck since you’re saying it’s just not the same thing. So, what do they do?
The pickup movement is not inherently bad.
Men and women are both largely driven by instinct when it comes to attraction to the opposite sex. Women, to their credit, figured this out eons ago and know exactly how to appeal to men’s instincts. Men’s attraction to women is largely driven by visual cues. Knowing this, women wear clothing that accentuates their body, wear make up, etc. That is simply them knowing how to trigger men’s sexual attraction instinct. Thus, no one in their right mind considers a statement like “Men fawn over women with big boobs and low cut shirts” to be sexist because it is by and large true.
The pick up artist movement is about teaching men how to trigger women’s instincts of attraction. With women, instead of being visual, it is all of the things listed in this thread so far - confidence, alpha behavior, uniqueness, etc. In this regard, men helping hapless other men learn how to appeal to these things is no different than when (as I’ve learned from movies :p) a group of women take their dorky friend and pick her out a sexy outfit and doll her up so that she can land a date with the Quaterback who never noticed her before.
One point that I did want to raise here is that those who are calling the pickup artist concept misogynistic, are, IMHO, guilty of misogynism themselves in that they are treating women as some sort of helpless chaste objects who can’t help but be carried away by some scumbag if he only knows how to press the right buttons. Women want to have sex too, and with someone as attractive as possible. There is nothing wrong with men learning what to do to appear as attractive as possible to women. Such a concept is far less misogynistic than one that denies women any agency whatsoever in their sexual choices.
Well, but nobody thinks these guys are being misogynist because they want to have sex and (impliedly) the women don’t. People think these guys are being misogynist because of the misogynist things they say and talk about doing.
Thanks. For me it’s been a long-term companion, because I came to understand my lack of interpersonal relationships as a kind of punishment for my condition - I mean, at some point, you have to ask yourself, “What did you expect?” I’ve yet to find my way out of that.
I suppose. But sometimes, perspective just lulls one into a false and restless sort of half-contentment that ends up being a lifelong trap. Sometimes I think I’ve yet to hit bottom, and should just stop putting it off.
I think the quoted sentence was imperative not declarative.
pdts
Well, to answer your last question first - it’s a superior solution because, not to be too blunt about it, it is more likely to work.
Which do you think is more likely to happen in, oh, the next year or so - that all of humanity thinks up a “… superior solution to trying to rethink how we interact with each other as human beings …”, or that one guy overcomes his shyness and starts talking and flirting with girls?
As to why people can’t just be happy being themselves - I see no reason why they should not, but of course they have to accept the sweet of that with the sour. If I am most “myself” when I’m playing video games all day, rather than working for a living, I should not complain when I have no money, or demand to have the same sort of cash as a person who works all day; if I am “myself” when smoking, eating potato chips all day and not exercising, being unhealthy is sort of a natural consequence of that. Similarly, if I’m an introvert who likes keeping to myself, I should sorta expect that I’m likely to be lonely.
If I dislike being lonely, the solution is not to wait around on my ass for the world to change, but to change those aspects of my behaviour which are making me lonely. I don’t see that as some sort of loss of essential integrity. Nor do I think it is easy to do. It is no easier than any other essential change to one’s lifestyle - ditching smoking, eating and exercising right, etc. etc. all of which many people have trouble with. However, the solution to a problem like being addicted to cigarettes is not to wait around until society comes up with a solution like a cure for lung cancer which would allow smokers to suffer no ill effects - even though quitting is hard.
I’m not saying that to put lonely people down, or question their essential worth; nor do I think that being some sort of swaggering dude is essential to manliness. However, if shyness is the problem, it strikes me as better to tackle the problem than to simply wish it were not a problem.
No, it was declarative. He was trying to pull a silver lining out of a cloud by saying “guys have the class to not insult women to their faces, while women will insult men to their faces.”
I would change this to “I should sorta expect that I’m likely to be alone.” Some people can be alone and not lonely.
But fundamentally, yes. If someone, man or woman, keeps mostly to themselves and doesn’t go out and about, I don’t really know how society can do anything about that.
Imagine that Marion is hungry. He’s so hungry he’s actually starving. So malnourished that his health is suffering. One day, he’s out and about and he collapses. He’s rushed to the hospital and they discover how malnourished he is and ask him about it.
“Society didn’t look out for me,” Marion says.
“Did you contact anyone for food stamps or go to a food pantry?”
“No. I didn’t tell anyone I was hungry. Society let me down.”
I think most of us would look at that story and say, “Dude, Marion, you gotta tell people. They can’t read your mind.”
So, are what some shy people expecting similar to what Marion was expecting? Are some, not all, shy people thinking other people should be able to tell that they are emotionally hungry without them having to say anything? I think it’s not an overstatement to say that ain’t gonna work (and I don’t think people would genuinely argue that it would or could. I think some positions are more ideals than practical solutions).
It took me a depressingly long time to stop thinking this. I still fall victim to it occasionally if I’m in a low mood.
Is there a PUA Techinques book for dummies?
Tricky one. I think there *are *people out there who believe that it’s perfectly obvious that they’ve never been seen to eat anything, and that if they “whine” and “beg” for food, they will attract scorn, derision, and even less chance of being fed.
I say that if on rare chance no man wants a woman, she’ll tend to grin and bear it and find other things to do with their lives than bother with men. If you know where women go and say on forums or forum-equivalents that “no one wants me!” then feel free to bring it up.
The women who gripe and moan are the ones who date guys and get mistreated by them. But they don’t count, either, because, well, nobody minds male-bashing.
So, men get resentful and mean and women just bear it and this… is supposed to make men more sympathetic somehow?
I mean, it’s completely a figment of your imagination this world where there are so few women who want sex and romance and can’t find them, but even if it weren’t, all you’re doing is saying that men are less able to deal with disappointment than women are. Is that really what you want to say? Why doesn’t that count as male-bashing?